Apple iPhone 4: Can't engineers just say no?

Apple's recent troubles raise questions about who exactly is empowered to stop-ship when a product doesn't conform to design requirements

Apple’s recent troubles raise questions
about who exactly is empowered to stop-ship when a product doesn’t
conform to design requirements

Howard Fidel, an analog design engineer at Schick Technologies, a manufacturer of digital dental radiography equipment, knows only too well how difficult antenna design can be--his current project involves a Wi-Fi dental device with a diabolical number of use scenarios. The product line Fidel supports has a five- to ten-year development cycle with approximately 1,000 units shipping out per month. He says he can only imagine the pressure placed on engineers in the consumer electronics industry and Apple in particular.

“Given the rapid product life cycles and Apple’s secrecy, engineers probably just weren’t able to do adequate beta testing. They probably gave it to a few engineers to test and then just blew a million units out of there in a month,” he says.

Other engineers seem to be in agreement: In a recent flash survey by EE Times asking engineers what they think is going on with the iPhone 4, the most popular theory proposed by 37% of the 220 respondents: “That’s what happens when engineers are pressured to get a product out the door.

"Only the people who were on the project and in the communication loop at the time really know what happened,” says Henry Martinez, senior vp for a software development company. Speaking on his new iPhone 4—he’s had minimal problems with dropped calls –he wondered whether the data was sufficient to be considered a risk, and whether engineers at Apple were empowered to pull the emergency stop switch, like workers on an automotive assembly line.

He notes that when engineers do raise red flags, it’s critical to sort out whether those concerns are simply the boy crying wolf or the true canary in the coal mine.

Antenna designer Fidel says that he doubts that since Apple engineers knew about the problem they would have let the product ship without management signing off on it. A widely-circulated Bloomberg article reported that a senior engineer at Apple raised concerns about the antenna’s design.

Though Fidel notes that he has not delivered a design that he felt was deficient in the last 20 years, it did happen once early on in his career. “When I was first out of college and working for a startup company, the president had me ship product that we knew did not work properly,” he says. “It was a strategic decision based on the lesser of two evils: being late or being wrong. Since it was a low-volume product we were able to easily fix everything later. He adds that he believes that it’s every engineer’s responsibility to document deficiencies, and then it’s up to management to decide whether or not a delay is acceptable.

Martinez speculates that sometimes engineers may be reluctant to voice their concerns because of misguided job-security fears. “They worry that blowing the whistle might get them in trouble, when actually not doing anything creates more problems, because any defects will be discovered in the field, instead of in testing,” he says. “Which everybody knows is much more expensive in the long run.”

Alan Wu, a hardware validation engineer at AMD, says he was surprised that a defect so seemingly obvious wasn’t caught before Apple shipped the product. “I don’t know about the culture at Apple, but something like this should have triggered a stop-ship, it shouldn’t have been let go to production. Product development is always a balance among cost/performance/risk. Apple clearly made a risk call and it backfired on them. There are probably a few people there right now saying, ‘I told you so.’”

In general, Wu says that engineers should report every concern so that if anything happens, at the very least they can say they reported the issue and were told to ship the product anyway. “By doing so, the responsibility is passed on to management and/or more senior engineers to make that final decision,” he says.

Not only that: As Fidel points out, “Engineers tend to want to perfect everything, and some projects would never get finished if management didn’t step in.

Engineers definitely have the right to say "no". Please refer IEEE Code of Ethics for engineers at this link:
http://www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/ethics_code.html
Unfortunately, due to job insecurity, engineers may tend to compromise on ethics due to pressure from PMs and executive management. A good strategy is to communicate in writing to management the risks associated and let management make the final decision. Anyway managers are ultimately responsible for business decisions. But as professional engineers we must adhere to code of ethics under all circumstances.
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I have an iPhone and absolutely love it! I also get tired of phones quickly, but I haven't got tired of this one. iPhones Rock! It is definitely the coolest phone out there at the moment.
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It is truly amazing to find and read so many articles on iPhone 4. First, the (apparent) leak of the iPhone 4 before its official release ( by the way, it was a good PR stunt...iPhone got all the attention without Apple spending a single penny). Now, this problem (or no problem) of the antenna design. I have read many articles, theories and conspiracies. Some article claim that Apple knew about this antenna problem but Steve Job liked the design so much that no-one raised the red flag or push the stop button. Steve Job even defended the antenna design by saying that the same problem is faced by other mobile manufacturers (i think RIM and other companies even denied Job's claim)...this article raises a valid question whether engineers should have more say in the product design. IMO in the consumer product market, the engineers will have a little say in the final design. Their opinions will be listened, documented and passed on to the marketing department.

I as an R & D engineer fully subscribe to the view that Engineers are always pressurized to say "yes" when they actually want to say "No". This has happened on the projects and products on which I worked. This is the result of over-commitment to the market and customers by the management/marketing. In an Automation project in which I was the development engineer, I was overruled by my manager when I voiced concern about inadequate testing before shipping the system to the customer. Later I had to spend almost a month at the customer site to re-tune the motion control PID parameters to meet the customer's requirements. And it earned a bad name for the company too.

It seems to me that the most likely explanation is being missed. IF you hold an iPhone 4 in your left hand (especially if that hand is very conductive) in a certain position when you are in an area of marginal signal strength then the antenna loses effectiveness. Once the YouTube video shows us how, we can all reproduce the scenario and it seems obvious. I believe that if this clear evidence had been presented to Apple management before launch of the product that it would have been addressed without any hesitation. The challenge is that such problems can be hard to find until a million people are playing with the device 24/7. Not everything is engineers vs. management. Sometimes troublesome scenarios are hard to find in advance. With the clarity of 20/20 hindsight, I do suspect that the test protocols will be revised based upon this lesson learned.

Yes, that is a good question. I agree, more data is needed.
I have to chuckle though, regarding the VP Martinez's comment on "misguided job-security fears" Many of us, who've been around, see that there are plenty of companies who will fire folks for telling the truth. Of course these types of companies don't survive long.

The big question in my mind is what are they calling a failure? My guess is that the problem is a few to many neurotic types seeing that there were not as many segments displayed on the signal strength indicator as they liked, and so, like all technical illiterate types, they presumed a failure. I don't recall haering anything about dropped calls, which is what I classify as a failure.
And of course the news media grabbed it and ran. Does anybody recall that old rock song "Dirty Laundry". It seems to fit in this case.

@lcovey: 37% is not a failure rate, its just an opinion of the users on what was the apparent issue.
As an engineer and an iphone 4 user I have in rare circumstances observed the said problem, with no effect on call quality. So my vote goes to "Its a PR issue".
Then again I don't have much comments on the contents of the article. What I am saying is the data has been misrepresented dividing it up in smaller bins so that it appears that majority thinks its it was an "engineers not getting enough time" issue. Which of course is always good to hear for us engineers. Even if backed by questionable numbers.

The answer to Icovey is no, although you should explain the term failure rate, is this catastrophic, hard reset required, soft error rate, or other.
As an example, most SSDs and HDs have an allowable soft error rates and at present this is number not dictated by any government agency that I am aware of.